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Obama: It’s a fantasy to think Syrian rebels could have beaten Assad with U.S. arms

He said there was no “ready-made moderate Syrian force that was able to defeat Assad,” and so pitting “farmers and dentists and folks who’ve never fought before” against a dictator and the “highly-trained jihadists” would have only one outcome.

Therefore, Obama continued, it’s a “fantasy” that the U.S. just sending a few arms to the moderate rebels would have helped, and he got in a little dig at the end by saying this is something that Washington and the press corps should understand better.

He said there was no “ready-made moderate Syrian force that was able to defeat Assad,” and so pitting “farmers and dentists and folks who’ve never fought before” against a dictator and the “highly-trained jihadists” would have only one outcome.

I guess dying while fighting for your future is worse than having your head lopped off in the street outside your house.

Barry O. was hoping his buddies the Muslim Brotherhood would do an Egypt on Syria.
Now all his Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood buddies are in prison with death sentences waiting to be carried out.
Barry O. is a sad dude.

Pitting farm boys and store clerks against the Whermacht is fantasy. Pitting farmboys and store clerks against British Redcoats is fantasy. Pitting rural, primitive living rice farmers against the might of the US military is fantasy. Rural opium farmers living essentially 7th century lives standing against a world superpower – twice – is fantasy.

For a bunch of people who have no knowledge or comprehension of history, they sure talk a lot about right/wrong side of history.

Not that I would support giving arms to terrorists, so maybe it was better that we sit it out, but I wonder if he would have said the same thing about us 230+ years ago.

He said there was no “ready-made moderate Syrian Colonial force that was able to defeat Assad England,” and so pitting “farmers and dentists and folks who’ve never fought before” against a dictator King and the “highly-trained jihadists redcoats” would have only one outcome.

None of my analogies are perfectly analogous by any means. And I’m not by any means convinced that Assad’s removal or defeat is in the US best interest. However, none are any more wrong than Obama’s absolute starement. With the analogies, Syria, ISIS and most things, the devil is in the details and I don’t think Obama understands or even wants to understand such complexities which is why he uses absolutes and strawmen almost exclusively.

So yes, my analogies had a snarky undertone intentionally and ignored details such as the great effect of Stueben and the French navy on the war fortunes of the Colonial military, COIN led limits on ROEs and McNamara’s interference in command decisions. But then I don’t think that Obama would understand anything in this paragraph without Wikipedia.

He said there was no “ready-made moderate Syrian force that was able to defeat Assad,” and so pitting “farmers and dentists and folks who’ve never fought before” against a dictator and the “highly-trained jihadists” would have only one outcome.

King Straw Man strikes again.

Did anybody say there was a ready-made moderate Syrian force?

Training “folks who’ve never fought before” is the specific mission of the Special Forces. They’re called “force multipliers,” but to know that, Obama would’ve had to sully his pristine anti-military creds by actually learning something about the military.

You ought to argue with leftists on Facebook. Easily the most proudly ignorant, simpleminded, anti-thinking people I’ve ever met.

Why would we want Assad gone? Having ISIS/ISIL ruling in Damascus doesn’t sound like a clever plan to me.

sharrukin on June 21, 2014 at 3:09 PM

Well, if Assad is gone, there goes Iran’s number one lackey state. Russia’s influence in the region takes a giant hit too. Assad also tried to get nukes, resulting in the Israeli Operation Orchard in 2007.

And he arms and trains Hezbollah, which holds all of Lebanon hostage.

ISIL can’t run a state. If Assad were gone, Israel’s gloves would be off. The Shi’ites would flock to Syria to fight ISIL, and Wahabbism would take another massive PR hit as it did when al Qaeda in Iraq went nuts on everyone.

For what it’s worth, Israel prefers Assad to ISIL. But if Assad fell, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing for us.